


7A WF 83429

by azephirin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 5000-10000 Words, Alternate Canon, Cooking, Cuddling and Snuggling, Driving, First Kiss, Food, Idaho, Incest, Jossed, M/M, Road Trip, Sharing a Bed, Siblings, Supernatural-West Wing Title Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-11
Updated: 2010-01-11
Packaged: 2017-10-06 04:34:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/49712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azephirin/pseuds/azephirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The demon's dead, Dean's soul is safe, and they're going to Idaho. (Idaho?) Contains, in no particular order, driving, kissing, eating, schmooping, and authorial meandering.</p>
            </blockquote>





	7A WF 83429

**Author's Note:**

> For the [Supernatural–West Wing Title Challenge](http://luzdeestrellas.livejournal.com/114077.html). Thanks to [](http://inkandchocolate.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://inkandchocolate.livejournal.com/)**inkandchocolate** for not laughing too hard at my flailing.

"There's not even eight hundred people in the entire Zip code," Dean complained, slamming the Impala into fifth to pass the Lincoln Navigator dawdling in the center lane. It was decked out with a variety of patriotic bumper stickers, which normally Dean would have ignored or rolled his eyes at, but the crow of his laughter as they came up on the SUV's left startled Sam out of his book. "Holy shit, Sammy, some people don't have the sense God gave a lima bean. Did you see that?"

"The petroleum consumption, you mean?"

"Well, yeah, that too, but I was talking about that bumper sticker. Tell me you saw that."

Sam shook his head, about to return to _The Pickwick Papers_. It was January, gray but mild in North Carolina, whose western border they were approaching; snowbound in Idaho, where they were going. _The Pickwick Papers_ marked the first work of fiction Sam had read in nine months, after the book he'd fallen asleep reading in the car earlier on the day the demon took him (_If on a Winter's Night a Traveler_, and of the many things for which Sam was thankful, one was that he didn't leave this world with a work of pretentious Italian postmodernism as the last book he read). Everything after that was frantically focused research, trying to find some way, any way, to break the curse.

Two weeks earlier, in Davie Crossroads, North Carolina, a town named after its most prominent feature, he'd broken it.

He promptly passed out from sheer relief, freaked the fuck out of Dean, came to, cried, told Dean he could shut the Christ up with the girl comments because Sam had just saved his soul, hugged Dean until he squawked, and then announced that he intended to sleep for two days, and they could find somewhere decent to stay for once—and by "decent" he meant not renting by the hour—and when he woke up, Dean could buy him some Chinese food.

Sam woke up not quite two days later—more like a day and a half—in a room quiet with the fading light of dusk. The rough texture against his face, he realized, was Dean's thigh, clad in its usual denim. The gentle movement in his hair was Dean's fingers. Sam didn't open his eyes immediately because he knew he would either kiss Dean or start crying again, or both, and Sam did actually have some pride, as well as some sense, as well as a threshold at which he started to feel he was about to summon the ghost of Elliott Smith. When he felt steadier, he stretched, opened his eyes, and said, "Where's my Chinese food?"

Dean's bright, clear laughter was the best thing he'd heard all year.

They stayed long enough to get some more rest, watch _Evil Dead I–III_ on cable, and eat pizza—the town being so small that there was not, in fact, any Chinese food to be had. There were two beds; they slept in one. There wasn't any discussion, but Sam didn't move to the other one, and neither did Dean. Sam woke up the first morning lying on his belly, Dean blanketing his left side; on the second, Dean was on his back, Sam's head on his stomach. They'd gone to sleep on opposite sides of the bed; Sam tried to be shocked about the shift during the night, but at its root it just seemed like confirmation of something he'd known for a long time.

When Sam found the hunt in Idaho, they packed up and left. Ultimately, Davie Crossroads was just another town.

*****************

 

"Oh, dude, you have to see this"—and, unbelievably, Dean slowed down to let the Navigator pull a little bit ahead.

Sam scanned its rear bumper. Unremarkable Pennsylvania plates. _PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals. W 2004. God Is Pro-Life. Celebrate Guantanamo._

_These Colors Don't Go Down._ With a helpful illustration of an American flag.

Sam laughed so hard he snorted. Dean sped up, and when Sam recovered, he looked over to see a bright, welcome flash of a grin.

"So anyway," Dean said, because he'd been interrupted from his round of complaining, "there are probably more sheep than people in this town where we're going. And there are some things that I don't ever need to see, no matter how freaky."

"So you're fine with vampires, zombies, wendigos, whatever, but a little bit of backwoods sheep-fucking and you run for the hills?"

"Vampires, zombies, all the rest of them do their thing because they don't have any control over it. Doesn't mean I like 'em, but it's just another case to deal with. People have control over who—or what—they fuck. And there's no reason in the world for that to be a sheep. And why are we talking about this? And what the hell is in Island Park, Idaho? And why the hell does Idaho have a town with the word 'island' in it?"

"We're talking about this because you brought it up," Sam said. "And as for the island thing, I have no idea. Wishful thinking, maybe. Anyway, about the only attraction this town has—apart from being close to Yellowstone—is Island Park Village Resort. From which people have been disappearing. Which we discussed at length yesterday. Were you paying attention, or was _Hot Busty Blondes XVI_ too riveting to tear yourself away?"

"Naw, dude. Number fifteen is totally better. I was listening. I just wanted to make sure there was an actual reason we're dragging ourselves from North Carolina to Buttfuck, Idaho."

"There isn't. I just thought it would be fun."

"Figures. Now find us some decent music."

Sam set _The Pickwick Papers_ aside, and did.

*****************

 

They were on I-40 for what seemed like forever, passing through Asheville, Knoxville, and a nearly endless series of little highway towns whose names Sam knew he'd never remember. Finally they hit Nashville, where they stopped for food—the distances in the South were longer, but Sam really couldn't complain about the eating—and afterwards they picked up I-24 up into Kentucky and then Illinois. They merged onto I-57 at Pulleys Mill. Sam saw signs for Cape Girardeau, less than fifty miles away, just across the river in Missouri. He waited for Dean to bring it up, but Dean said nothing.

Cassie had to have heard something about what had happened over the previous couple of years, after she'd seen Dean last; Sam wondered whether law enforcement had shown up at her door, demanding how she knew Dean and when her last contact with him had been. The Winchesters' legal situation had improved significantly—saving a special agent's godson from a striga will do that—but nothing was completely clear yet. The Impala was wearing Georgia plates—as Hendrickson had said, it was one of the few states where people can and do keep road-condition forty-year-old cars for everyday use—and they had shiny new IDs, with Atlanta addresses, that would hold up to a DMV check or a police scan. Dean Colt and Sam Remington, because someone in the Bureau had a sense of humor. Not brothers, not related. Just two guys in a car.

Sam's feelings on that matter were, in a word, conflicted.

Things weren't entirely worked out yet, though, and they'd been advised to lie low. Dean Herbert (after their mother's father—Sam wasn't sure Dean had ever admitted his middle name to anyone) Winchester was still wanted for a whole host of crimes, from indecent exposure (Sam didn't want to know) to first-degree murder; Samuel Frederick (not as bad as Herbert) Winchester's record was almost as bad. That would probably never go away. Hendrickson had some connections who were able to swap out the fingerprint records, so at least if they got arrested now, no one would match their prints with their new identities. But Sam and Dean Winchester were, effectively, dead. If Samuel David Remington wanted a college degree, he'd have to start over as a freshman—the records at Stanford belonged to his felonious avatar. But at least no one was trying to arrest him for murder.

That said, it'd probably have been a bad idea to go visit Cassie, for a variety of reasons.

******************

 

They stopped for the night in St. Louis, clearing about six hundred miles for the day, a shorter run than they were accustomed to. Time felt different now.

There was a lot more of it.

Having actual, verifiable identities was an advantage in every way but one: It made credit-card fraud impossible, or at least inadvisable. They'd been legal for three months, and they'd slept in the car more during those ninety days than they had in the entire rest of the time since Sam left Stanford. They were moving more slowly, stopping to pick up odd jobs in the various towns they passed through. Hustling pool, however, while frequently inadvisable, is not illegal, so Dean still did that—the only problem was, as ever, that Sam couldn't go to another place and play his own games at the same time, since Dean frequently needed backup against groups of pissed-off hustlees. So they'd yet to find a perfect way to make a living.

It was Sam's private opinion that settling down somewhere for more than a week was, if imperfect, better than the other options.

The place in St. Louis looked like it probably did charge by the hour, but it was a roof other than the Impala's and a shower that had at least a fighting chance of being hot. And even if the shower was cold, it was still running water.

St. Louis is a real city, and Sam got his Chinese food, finally. He got General Tso's chicken, as usual, and Dean got Mongolian beef, as usual, and they got two orders of dumplings, as usual, and sprawled across one of the beds and fought over the dumplings and stole food from each other and watched _Aqua Teen Hunger Force_, which Dean complained about but then didn't change the channel when Sam finally handed him the remote out of sheer exasperation.

There was an ease to all this—an innocence, even—that drew Sam back into childhood, to nights in motels much like this one when their dad was away on a hunt, and Sam and Dean were left to eat whatever the closest food was and watch the most bizarre thing they could find on television.

There's a world that forms between people who are strangers in a place. The majority of Sam's life, except for three ephemeral years at Stanford, had been spent in that world—and, specifically, had been spent in that world with Dean. And, Sam thought, maybe that explained why, when he looked over at Dean lately, he thought not just _his hair's getting long_ or _he looks tired_ but also _I want to run my hand down his back and trace the muscles under his T-shirt_. And then, later, do it again, only with nothing in the way, just Sam's touch on Dean's skin. And he was pretty sure that Dean wanted the same thing—but Sam wasn't sure enough to risk it and the destruction that would ensue if he was wrong. He hadn't come this far just to lose Dean to that. But in their world, the circle of two they'd shared for as long as Sam could remember, it felt like the right thing to do—if not the _only_ thing to do.

That part, obviously, was much less innocent.

After a while Dean got restless and wanted to go find a game—they still had a lot of country to cross before Island Park, and it was significantly less pleasant to sleep in the Impala in the Great Plains as compared to, say, the Carolinas. "You want to come out?" Dean said. "Or do you need to watch your talking food?"

They came back to the room later with several hundred dollars won nonviolently. Sam took the first shower while Dean counted it all. He was almost asleep when Dean got out, but awake enough to feel the other side of the bed settle and a long, muscular warmth stretch out next to him. Sam didn't turn over, but if, during the night, he curled in closer to that warmth, burrowing against it under the blankets, it was merely the natural response to cold.

********************

 

The next day was Grand Island, Nebraska, and more commentary from Dean regarding the lying liars who would give a completely landlocked town the title "island." The town was perfectly flat, laid out in precise squares, and frankly it freaked Sam out a little: In northern California, he'd gotten used to unruly hills and unpredictable city planning. He flashed back to taking CalTrain into San Francisco, how there'd been something oddly comforting about getting lost in the city and then finding his way again, on purpose or by accident—how if he kept wandering long enough, eventually he'd find a place he recognized. That would never happen in Grand Island, he thought. It's just not possible to get lost in a place so hill-less and organized.

There wasn't as much hustling to be had in Grand Island as in St. Louis, but Dean managed a little—and then, it appeared, just started playing for fun. Sam was getting wifi from someone's apartment, and he stayed sprawled at the table with the laptop, researching the disappearances in the other non-island Island town and occasionally glancing up to watch Dean.

The Island Park Village Resort (which was really more of a hunting lodge and waystation for hikers bound to or from Yellowstone) had been in business for years, Sam found, and every ten to fifteen there was a rash of missing persons. Whatever was causing it didn't discriminate on basis of gender or geographic origin—the victims had been both tourists and townies—but it definitely liked its victims under the age of thirty-five. That was, it seemed, their only shared characteristic—everything else, from age to race to family background, was different.

Well, and they'd all been staying at the resort. Sam supposed that level of bad luck counted as its own sort of shared characteristic.

Sam kept reading, stopping only when Dean materialized in front of him, leaning against the table. "You want to go? Or you need to sit here and brood some more?"

Sam's hand wanted to settle on Dean's hip. Wanted to settle, pull him in close, dare him to raise the stakes. Often Dean did things only when dared, and Sam suspected this would be one of them: He might want it as much as Sam did, but he wasn't going to make the first move.

But instead Sam just closed the laptop. "Not brooding; doing some reading on the place in Idaho. You done playing?"

***********************

 

Back at the motel, Sam came out of the bathroom to find Dean watching..._Spongebob Squarepants_? He stopped in his tracks to stare first at the television, then at Dean. "Christo?"

"Oh, shut the fuck up. It's funny."

"It is funny. I just...never took you for a Spongebob fan, Dean."

"I said shut the fuck up. You done in there?"

"All yours."

Shaking his head and wondering at the logic that permitted _Spongebob Squarepants_ but not _Aqua Teen Hunger Force_, Sam took the remote and turned the TV to CNN, then crawled into the other side of the bed from where Dean had been. Yet again, there was a second bed; yet again, their luggage and weapons were strewn all over it. This one was still warm from Dean lying on it. Sam tried to pay attention to the news from Myanmar, but found himself drifting off to sleep instead.

Dean came back a few minutes later, turned off the lights, and turned the television to another channel—a movie, it sounded like—with the volume low. After a moment Sam felt Dean's fingers in his hair, gentle, as if reminding himself Sam was there. After another moment they moved to stroke up and down Sam's spine, still gentle, and Sam wasn't sure whether this was meant to calm Dean or himself.

He wondered whether Dean knew he was awake.

In other circumstances this might have eased Sam the rest of the way into sleep—the warmth, the low sound of the television, the quiet presence of Dean next to him—but now he was wide awake, every nerve in his body attuned to the slow path of his brother's hand. He kept his eyes closed, tried to force his breathing to remain even, shallow. But he stayed relentlessly awake, lying sleepless until Dean turned off the television, set the alarm, and settled next to him.

When Sam woke up the next morning—early, before the alarm—Dean's arm was across his chest, as though he'd needed to assure his sleeping self that Sam was really there.

Sam lay still until the alarm went off.

******************

 

They made it to Island Park the next day.

It was a long day, sixteen hours counting short stops for lunch and dinner, and a detour when it turned out one of the roads through Grand Teton and Yellowstone was impassible from snow. They finally arrived and checked in, playing the parts of weary, snowbound travelers. The woman at the desk assumed—as so many people did—that they were a couple, and it was a measure of Dean's exhaustion that he didn't even take offense. They had a vacancy, and the woman gave them keys and directions to unit 7A.

It was a condo, decent but by most people's standards not luxurious—by Winchester standards, the place was a palace. There was a living room, a real kitchen, a separate bedroom. Sam knew, rationally, that they were here to investigate a bunch of disappearances, but he wouldn't have minded just sitting by the fire for a while. The fire. In the fireplace. Which they had.

In other years, they'd have flipped for the sofa bed vs. the real bed. They didn't bother this time. It was too late to get anything done on the case—they'd start work in the morning—and when Sam curled up against Dean's back, eased an arm around him, Dean didn't protest. Sam felt his brother's body relax, wanted to lean forward just a little and kiss the back of his neck, lick the spot right under his hairline.

Instead he closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

******************

 

The next morning, Dean charmed the girl at the desk and got the number for the room where Carol Bartlett, the most recent missing person, had been staying. She was from St. Anthony, about forty miles away, but had come to stay for a couple of weeks during the off-season; the girl at the desk had known her socially. "We haven't put anyone else in there," she said. "We're never full up this time of year, and...well, it's a little creepy, you know? In a few weeks we'll have to clean it up when the season starts, but it's not really the kind of thing we're really rushing to do."

Dean raised his eyebrows. "Clean it up?"

"It's not like there's blood in there or anything! It's just...I know it's not likely, but we're all kind of hoping maybe she'll come back, and everything will be there for her, you know?"

"Well," Dean said once another customer had appeared and they were back outside, "if that's not a golden opportunity, I don't know what is."

They had to go back to the room—the apartment, more accurately—for latex gloves; one unanticipated side effect of the whole being-legal thing was that they had to take much greater care about leaving fingerprints. Sam hated the gloves—they never fit him right—but he'd hated being on the run from the FBI even more.

Dean stood watch, Sam picked the lock, and they were inside.

Carol Bartlett's apartment was the same size and layout as theirs. Their source hadn't been kidding when she'd said Carol's belongings had been left in place: Everything was there, down to the pair of muddy shoes on the doormat. Dean walked through the living room, moving almost delicately so as not to touch anything; Sam followed. This was by no means the first crime scene they'd ever burglarized, and it would likely not be the last, but it felt oddly voyeuristic, looking at Carol Bartlett's things, as though they were spying on her, even though she was, at best, lost in the wilds of Yellowstone, and at worst...well, "at worst" could comprise any number of things that Sam would wish only on, say, the Yellow-Eyed Demon.

There were papers on the dining table; he and Dean looked down at them at the same time. "WF," Dean read. "PE. EA. And I don't even know what that other stuff is."

It was a jolt to see something like that again, but the markings and layouts were instantly familiar. "They're book galleys," he said. "Proofs for a book, before it's printed. I guess Carol Bartlett was a proofreader."

"What does all this shit mean?"

"Wrong font. Printer error. Editor's alteration. That"—he pointed to a carat with a short, curving line beneath it—"means to insert a comma. The looped line means delete." Right next to it was the manuscript Carol had been proofing against; a little farther away on the table lay the _Chicago Manual of Style_ and _Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary_, eleventh edition.

"You do this at school?" Dean asked after a moment. His voice carried the tone it always did on the rare occasions he asked about Stanford—hesitant, diffident, almost.

"No. But Jess did, freelance, as a part-time job. She had an internship with a book publisher the summer after her freshman year, and she kept freelancing for them after that. It paid a hell of a lot better than working at Starbuck's."

"Huh." Pause. "It's like a code."

Sam shrugged. "I guess it is a code—you have to write a certain way so that the typesetter can understand you. Anyway, it doesn't tell us much about Carol's disappearance that we don't already know."

They looked around the rest of the apartment. Even the food in the fridge was still in place (though the milk really, really shouldn't have been); it was as though Carol had just gone out for a run, or to the tiny general store a few miles away, and would be back in a few minutes. Except for the date on the milk, there was nothing to suggest that she'd been gone for two weeks.

They left Carol's apartment and went to see whether they could get into any of the units where the other missing people had been staying. It had been a while since those disappearances—weeks, months—and the places had been cleaned out. Some had guests staying in them, but others were empty. They broke into the unoccupied ones easily.

There was nothing to find—just closed, empty spaces. The EMF reader brought up nothing. They were merely apartments, waiting to be occupied.

**********************

 

Carol hadn't said much about why she'd wanted to rent a sportsman's condo forty-five minutes from her own home, but the girl at the desk had mentioned that Carol had recently been through a bad breakup. Maybe she'd wanted some peace and quiet; that would explain why she'd gone off-season and taken work with her.

"Maybe she just had a crazy ex," Dean said. It was late afternoon and they were at the library in Idaho Falls, having come up with precisely squat trying to talk to the various family and friends. A lot of people just weren't around—if you could afford to get the hell out of Idaho in January, pretty much you did. Idaho Falls was the nearest large town—and the nearest decent newspaper—and they'd been there since around one o'clock. They were close to so many national parks, it should have been a pretty drive, but there'd been a lot of mining out here, and in a lot of places the land was stripped bare.

"It seems like too much of a pattern for that," Sam said.

Dean shrugged acquiescence.

"Do you ever wonder, though," Sam went on after a moment, "when you hear stories about girls—women—who just disappear. Good relationships with their families and partners, good jobs, that kind of thing; they just take their keys and go for a run and are never seen again."

"Like that White House intern who disappeared a few years back."

"Bureau of Prisons, I think, not White House. But yeah, her: Chandra Levy. Anyway, do you ever wonder whether these people made themselves disappear—whether they ran away from their lives, you know?"

"That girl was murdered, wasn't she?"

"Yeah, they found her body about a year later. I don't mean her specifically. I just mean that you hear stories like this, and sometimes the whole thing comes off as too perfect—maybe their relationships with their families and boyfriends weren't as great as everyone made them sound."

Dean looked up skeptically from the _Idaho Falls Post Register_. "So you think Carol Bartlett took off?"

"I have no idea what happened to Carol Bartlett, at least not yet. I just think— I don't know." The whole thing was starting to wear at Sam—the blank face of this case; the cold; the smiling faces of the missing people, shown in pictures from better times; the vast emptiness of the country around them, the Impala just a speck in the ribbon of road; and whatever the hell was going on with Dean.

At the end of the day, after three arguments and way too much microfilm, they were no further than when they started, except now they were in Idaho Falls.

Ugh.

***********************

 

An advantage of an apartment—one of many—was that Sam could cook. Since they were in an actual town, Sam made Dean take him to the grocery store, and despite Dean's predictable commentary about the estrogen levels in Sam's body, Dean added just as many things to the cart as Sam did. They couldn't buy too much—who knew how long they'd actually be there—but it was enough for meals for the next three days.

Longer-range planning than they usually engaged in.

Sam picked up—in between throwing back Dean's attempts at buying every package of cookies in the store—the makings for lasagna; it was the one actual meal-type food that he still remembered how to make. He wanted, sometime, to be settled somewhere long enough to have a rack of spices always at his disposal, and a liter of good olive oil, and Dean standing in the doorway to the kitchen, drinking beer and heckling him. (He was not deluded enough to think that Dean would be of any assistance.)

"Hey." Smack on the arm from Dean, taking one hand off the steering wheel. "Stop brooding."

"For fuck's sake, Dean, I'm not brooding." Total lie. "I'm trying to remember how to make the lasagna." Also a total lie.

"Yeah, whatever. Just try not to poison me."

"Dean, if I've gotten this far without killing you, I don't think I'm going to do it, and especially not with food that I'll be eating, too."

Maybe it wasn't angst; maybe it was just low blood sugar. Sam twisted to reach into the backseat for a banana.

**************************

 

Back in Island Park, they carried everything into the apartment, at which point Dean announced, "Alright, bitch, you cook. I'm going to watch the game."

Sam was pretty sure there wasn't any "game" on.

"Oh, bullshit you will, Dean. You're going to chop vegetables, and you're going to like it." He considered throwing a bell pepper at Dean's head, but decided it would be a waste of a bell pepper.

It wasn't just low blood sugar.

"Fine," said Dean, sounding oppressed, but he came into the kitchen—it was barely big enough for both of them to be in it at the same time—and put down his beer. Sam turned to hand him an onion to dice—because Sam was more than capable of that level of pettiness—and there they were, inches apart, and it was simplicity itself to set the onion on the counter and curl his hand around the back of Dean's neck like he'd been wanting to do for days, months, years.

There was a span of time—maybe it was only a second, maybe it was even less than that—when it seemed the whole world had gone still. It was not just the snowy silence outside but also the kinetic sense of potential, of possibility, of probability.

Of inevitability.

Dean tasted like Sam Adams, and Sam (Winchester) (Remington) probably tasted like bananas, and they were standing in a pint-sized kitchen in Idaho with an onion on the counter next to them. Sam felt himself smiling against Dean's mouth because, well, how else was this supposed to happen? He nipped at Dean's lips a little bit, tasted his tongue, moved his hands to cup them around Dean's face. He could feel the pressure and warmth of Dean's hands on his back, on his hip, and Sam pushed him against the counter; Dean's arms came up around him, fingers tangling in Sam's hair, and the knot of tension in the back of Sam's mind suddenly dissolved.

Sam pulled back to lick Dean's ear, because he could; bite gently at his earlobe, and listen to Dean's breath go in despite himself. Dean started, "I'm not—" and Sam sucked gently at his throat, and Dean gasped and had to start over again. _Gotcha,_ Sam thought, and didn't even pretend that he wasn't smirking.

"I'm not the fucking girl," Dean finally got out, and Sam had to hold back from laughing, saying, _We're committing incest—or something really damn close to it—in the middle of Idaho, and neither of us seems particularly perturbed by this, and what concerns you is the antiquated gender role?_

"Yeah," said Sam, "you really are," and pressed against him, tilted Dean's head back and kissed him again, let Dean feel how hard Sam was.

Dean made a soft, distinctly unmanly noise, and said, "Fine. Fuck you," and Sam didn't bother concealing his laughter, either.

He turned them around, put himself against the counter, slid his hands down Dean's back, and said, "Is this better? Because I, unlike you, really don't care."

"Asshole," Dean said, but didn't go anywhere, and they went back to kissing again, because—Sam Adams or not—it tasted too good to keep from doing it for long, and Sam loved the low, growling gasps that Dean made now that he felt he was in charge. "God," Dean said, "I want— I mean, I want—"

"Yeah," Sam said, "me too."

They stood still for a while, until Dean added, "But I want some damn food first," and Sam laughed, free and unrestrained.

With one thing and another, it took about three hours to make the lasagna.

***********************

 

It was strangely not-awkward, later, going to bed—dinner made and eaten, leftovers put away, kitchen cleaned. The bathroom routines functioned as they always had, and Sam put on sweatpants and a T-shirt like he always did, and Dean stripped down to his boxers like he always did, and they got in bed like they'd been doing for the past week. Only this time, when they curled up together, they were both awake—if tired—and Sam lay with his head on Dean's arm, lazily tracing his fingertips over the bare skin of Dean's chest, belly, sides. At some point, he thought, he'd trace farther than that and find out what Dean's growls **really** sounded like, but in the meantime he was happy with just this, the two of them warm and safe, his hands on Dean the way he'd wanted them, nothing in between.

"So tomorrow," Dean said, his own fingers mirroring on Sam's back the patterns Sam's fingers were making on his chest, "I think we should head back to the library. There's a lot in the old papers that we didn't get to check out."

Pillow talk, Dean-style.

"Yeah, you're probably right. They open at nine."

Dean shuddered, and Sam silently agreed. It was a little over an hour's drive, which meant they'd have to be up around seven, seven thirty.

He turned Dean's head to kiss him good-night. It turned into Sam stretched out on top of Dean, Dean's head in his hands, Dean's legs tangled around his, Dean's hands on Sam's neck and back, straying underneath his T-shirt, calluses sparking shivers throughout Sam's body.

They managed to stop after a while, and Sam buried his face in Dean's neck, trying to send his breathing back down to somewhere near normal. There would be time for this. There would be years and years, all kinds of time, for this, as much of it as they wanted.

Later—probably not until they were done here in Island Park—he would bring up the idea of a home base, a place that could actually be theirs. They would argue some more, and possibly Dean would sulk, but they could work something out, now that they had time.

"Hey, gigantor, you're fucking heavy," Dean muttered, and shoved at Sam until he had Sam settled on his side, back to Dean's chest.

Tomorrow they'd go back to the library, try some of the locals again, try whatever they could to stop more people from disappearing. In the meantime—this. Sam closed his eyes, let himself sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Island Park (ZIP code: 83429) is in fact a real place, as is the Island Park Village Resort, though I have been to neither and have obviously taken liberties with both. (And I hope I haven't offended any readers who may be from Island Park and/or Idaho. All in the name of fiction!) Since you deserve a treat for getting through this, here's [the lasagna Sam made](http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Cheesy-Vegetable-Lasagna/Detail.aspx)—only with the additions of ground beef (because you know Dean wouldn't eat it otherwise) and tomatoes (because lasagna without tomato of some variety is an aberration of nature).
> 
> **Also:** There is now an exceedingly schmoopalicious sequel, "[Wilderness Board](http://archiveofourown.org/works/50185)."


End file.
